One early Friday morning (yesterday to be precise), on waking up, I drowsily picked my phone up and as I do, clicked on my social media apps, one of which was Instagram. Saw an Instastory from MAMI of this scrumptious looking hamburger that she posted 50-odd minutes prior:

On seeing the photo, I just randomly typed a comment, not really expecting anything in return:

Later in the day, I saw MAMI responded to a few of the comments made and when I saw the first response was to a comment that looked like mine, I thought to myself – FINALLY, AFTER SEVEN YEARS! Now, I admit that the comment of おいしそうですよ！ is pretty commonplace and it could’ve been ANYONE. Nah, it was mine. I don’t care if no one believes me.

The thing with the missus is that it is so rare to get a response from her. I am talking even in the early days when the band started doing Twitter like 9-10 years(ish) ago. I remembered friends from SH Malaysia or Singapore going on how RINA responded to their tweet after a show et cetera. They seem to be more on Instagram these days and they alluded to not being too keen on Twitter of late (this was mentioned in Episode 9 of the 水曜日のSCANDAL video broadcast for MANIA about a couple of weeks ago).

Nevertheless, in my time being a SCANDAL fan, I have had actual responses from the rest of the band. My first was a reply from HARU to a tweet I sent to them before boarding the plane to Tōkyō in 2015 for the HELLO WORLD Hall Tour.

HARU’s response:

As for the other two responses, both were related to SCANDAL HEAVEN COVER BAND projects. I edited the video for SHCB’s rendition of お願いナビゲーション, after which I shot a tweet to the band following which RINA responded with a retweet.

The other one was a tweet following the completion of our cover of LOVE on which I played rhythm guitar. TOMOMI then retweeted that too.

SCANDAL still does soc media albeit more on Instagram, and they do respond to DM’s as seen on RINA’s tiny channel on YouTube, or the times when they go live on Instagram. If you do get a response these days, it’ll be mainly luck or your post is profound enough to catch their attention, especially when their fanbase has increased somewhat now.

By the way, what MAMI wrote (あざす – pronounced azasu）is a colloquial abbreviation of Arigatō goZAimaSU. I had to look it up on Google as a direct translation of it doesn’t make sense! 嬉しかった、MAMIちゃん！

You can follow MAMI on her Instagram at @mmts_dayo.